Sunday, July 10, 2016

Moral Outrage is Appropriate, but It Doesn't Solve the Problem

Moral outrage is a perfectly human response to many
situations. The problem with moral outrage is that it’s not really a solution. Declarations
such as “This has to stop!” and “This is totally unacceptable!” need to be
accompanied by substantive policy recommendations. How do you reduce the number
of police shootings of innocent civilians?

You can’t just say “Stop making mistakes!” Any encounter
between police and civilians has a non-zero chance of becoming one of these
fatal escalations. So adding up the millions and millions of encounters, most
of which are peaceful, will inevitably lead to a few horrific mistakes. A
substantive discussion would include some policy changes that fix the problem.
Notice that even a slightly more specific framing of the problem still isn’t
helpful: “These shootings happen because too many police officers are racist,
and their fear of black people causes them to be trigger-happy.” This may or
may not be a correct diagnosis, but it raises the question of what policy tweaks can we implement to make
people less racist? It’s very hard to change culture, and it’s very hard to
change the nature of people. We don’t have a policy lever that turns bad people
into good people. We need to tweak our institutions so that we get the best
possible result out of the crooked timber we’re working with.

We could implement a policy that bluntly leads to fewer
interactions between police and civilians. You *could* require stricter
criteria for making a traffic stop so that there are fewer of them, but this
would mean that it’s harder to make traffic stops for legitimate reasons and
catching fewer real criminals. There’s a false positive/false negative
trade-off. Do you want to harass fewer innocents and let more criminals off the
hook, or do you want to catch more real criminals and harass more innocent
people? There’s an inverse relationship between the two kinds of errors (taking
everything else as a given: fixed resources, a given level of law enforcement
experience, our institutions as they currently exist, etc.). I picture an ideal
world where everybody understands this principle and sees the same inverse
curve (with false positives on the X-axis and false negatives on the Y-axis)
and the substantive argument is about *where* on that curve we want to be.

Or perhaps we can reduce both kinds of errors by throwing
more resources at the problem. Some kind of sensitivity training or tactical
training for police officers might work, but it needs to be established that
such a training program *actually* works or the officers will resent and
ridicule it. There could even be a backlash, where police officers resent the
treatment so much it has the opposite of the intended effect. Not to mention it
would be a waste of money and a distraction of our scarce law enforcement
resources. Any high-sounding solution needs to be tested for effectiveness.

Maybe you can do better screening for problematic police
officers, but this will raise the cost of hiring law enforcement personnel by
limiting the pool of applicants. It may be a cost worth paying, but we should
face it with our eyes wide open. Also, this once again presents the
false-positive/false-negative trade-off. If you raise the bar, you will exclude
more problem officers, but you will also exclude more perfectly good candidates
who happen to score low on your imperfect selection criteria. This should be
evaluated in cost-benefit terms *and* in terms of fairness to the individuals.

(A minor, slightly technical aside here. There is no test
that tells you with certainty “This is a problem officer” and “This is a good
officer.” But you could come up with a test that says, “Given this person’s
background and test score, this person has a 5% (or 10% or 15%) chance of
becoming a problem officer.” You can work on making the test as accurate a
discriminator as possible, but you will never separate your population cleanly
into 100% good and 100% bad police officers. Wherever you set the bar, you are
always running the risk of turning away good officers and accepting bad ones. Both
kinds of errors will always happen. The choice you face is the relative
proportions of these kinds of errors.)

There are other questions. What level of government should
respond to the problem? Is there even a “lever” to pull here? As in, a policy
change that affects the problem? Should a higher level of government step in if
a local government is intransigent in implementing a solution? Does such an intervention raise concerns
about democracy and voter sovereignty? “Stop being so racist” might be good
advice, but is there a policy lever to address it? (As in, “The more money and
resources we throw into this machine, the less racism we have in law
enforcement.”)

It reminds me of when my kids are fighting over a toy, and
my lazy response is to just say, “Stop fighting, guys.” And they both still
have their hands on the toy. This isn’t a solution; I have to get in there and adjudicate
the dispute. I have to decide which one of them gets the toy, which means I
have to break the other one’s grip. Possibly, I also need to set a policy, such
as “These toys are yours, these toys are his. Don’t play with your brother’s
toys without permission.” Or “The toys are collectively owned and anyone can
play with any toy, so long as your brother isn’t playing with it at the moment.”
Unfocused moral outrage accomplishes about as much as me telling my kids to “stop
fighting.” When I hear things like, “Let’s all just get along” and “This should
never happen” or “Can’t people just stop being shitty to each other?”, I think
the speakers are really dodging the important questions. For some reason it’s
considered cynical to talk about politics when something tragic occurs, but I
think it’s necessary to have a serious discussion about which policies lead to
fewer tragedies. (I am in no way backing down from my previous position, that we shouldn't react to individual tragedies.) Policy setting *is*
politics. I understand why many people want to be non-combatants in this fight
over policy-setting. It does get ugly. It ruins friendships. But it’s a fight
that has to happen. Unless we have that discussion (no, that heated argument)
about which policy fix to implement, we won’t solve the problem. Denouncing bad
behavior while bowing out of the policy fight is like telling your brats to “just
stop fighting” while leaving both of them still grasping the toy. You’ve
expressed your wish that a problem would go away, but haven’t really done
anything about it.

With all that said, it’s possible that unfocused moral
outrage actually *does* accomplish something. Police forces are surely scared
to death that the wrath of society will come down upon them if they make the
wrong mistake, and this surely has some effect on their level of caution. And
some policy fixes have been implemented already. There are more body cameras,
and maybe my perception is wrong but I’ve seen more instances of officers being
punished or fired for shameful behavior on social media. Body cameras and
personnel vetting are real policy fixes, and I could think of a few others. Legalizing
drugs would eliminate the need for many police-citizen interactions, as I’ve said before. “Stop and frisk” policies, where the police randomly search (mostly young
minority) pedestrians, could be eliminated. “Community policing” initiatives,
where the police try to promote a good relationship with the public they serve,
would give police officers a lot of non-violent tools for dealing with problem
individuals or potential suspects. Angry protests, even if they don’t
specifically ask for any of these fixes, might accomplish some of them anyway. Community
leaders (like the mayor, city council, or police leadership) facing the choice,
“Do *something* or face more angry traffic-snarling, commerce-choking mobs”
might get their collective shit together and implement some of these solutions,
which is great. “Moral outrage” is an important mode of the human experience
and it can initiate real change. But it’s more constructive sometimes to shut
it off and think about how to fix the problem.